“No …” Brian muttered. “That’s not possible.”

He dropped his tuba case and raced for the inside doors, yanking them open. A few kids remained in the halls, but as with Ms. Joanna, each figure was frozen in place. Their mouths gaped open midconversation, their feet balanced in dangling strides.

Somehow, the world had stopped for everyone except Brian.

He took a deep breath, just to prove that he could, and pulled at his hair. He was awake. He was alive. This was real. Brian approached a boy and girl several feet away, seventh graders he dimly recognized as members of the drama club. The girl had swept back her long hair with a hand; it hung suspended in the air like decorative Halloween cobwebs.

Brian laughed. He couldn’t help it. This was too bizarre. Too preposterous! Moving back to the door, he peered outside again and was surprised to see his tuba case hanging in midair—frozen in time the moment he dropped it.

“Unreal,” he said, laughing again.

His blood curdled the moment he heard a second voice laughing with him.

Slowly, Brian turned. Across the lobby, a figure stood at the end of a long hallway, one in which the lights had already been cut off for the day. Brian squinted. He couldn’t make out many details. The figure was tall—a teacher, maybe?—and it was every bit as still as everything else. Until it wasn’t.

The figure glided forward in a single, languid movement, rounding and winding as it went, but always pointed in his direction. It tread a circuitous path that felt deceptively hostile to Brian—menace disguised as playfulness. Then, just as suddenly as it’d moved, the figure stopped, still shrouded in darkness.

“Hello?” Brian called, startled by the naked fear in his own voice. “Do you know what’s going on? Why is everyone frozen?”

The stranger said nothing, but Brian could feel its eyes on him. He took a step backward, his hip pressing against the push bar that opened the door.

The figure glided slowly forward again, zigzagging into the light, then paused.

It was an old woman. She was white—pale, but most were in a town as gloomy as New Rotterdam—and wore a knit cardigan and jeans. She looked like any number of sweet New England grandmothers, with a halo of gray-white hair and a disarming, if slightly confused, smile. She must be here to pick some kid up from their after-school activities. Still, she looked a bit bewildered to Brian. Like she didn’t quite know where she was.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you need help?”

“Help?” the woman repeated back at him.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Brian said. “But … but are you here for someone?”

“Here for someone …” the old woman echoed again. “I’m here for you, Brian.”

She smiled, and Brian noticed for the first time that the woman had too few teeth. What teeth she did have were long and thin and needlelike. Almost like …

Like fangs.

The woman kept smiling, her grin growing wider and deeper, her teeth longer and sharper. And all this time, she wore the same bewildered expression, even as her jaw unhinged and her mouth gaped open—revealing a ruddy cavity lined in stubby, jagged points.

Brian’s feet were moving before his mind had caught up.

He slammed the door open, screaming as he tore through the courtyard, past Ms. Joanna and her suspended keys. Glancing behind him, he caught a blur of movement that wound to his right flank, before curving back around again to his left. It was so fast. Impossibly fast!

He pushed forward, ignoring the dizzying sweeps and curls of whatever hunted him. Soon he burst from the courtyard and into the school parking lot, where dozens of parents and teachers awaited.

Some greeted their children with petrified smiles, while others were packed into idling cars. Steam burped upward from exhaust pipes, suspended in time like morning fog clinging stubbornly past its welcome. The lights were bright, the school’s flood beams casting the scene into a strange diorama of families reuniting.

“Help!” Brian shrieked at the assembled adults. “Help me, PLEASE!”

But none of them turned.

None of them even saw poor Brian as he fled for his life.

Nor did they see the writhing shape that pursued him, curving around his left and striking from the side. It took him in full view of a dozen adults, and no one moved a muscle to help.

New Rotterdam was no place to grow up.

Back in the courtyard, the hourglass flowed—its glittering scarlet sand carefully measuring an hour’s worth of time.

When the last grain finally slid through its narrow glass neck, into its gorged belly, there was a subtle sense of movement in the frame. For a moment, it appeared as if the many golden snakes that decorated the hourglass slithered in drowsy circles.

The next moment, the hourglass was gone.

Two sounds immediately echoed across the courtyard. One was a set of keys that jangled to the ground. The other, the bang of a tuba case hitting the pavement.

Brian Skupp, however, was never heard from again.

The Long-Necked Dog

From the New Rotterdam Wiki Project

Despite its name, the New Rotterdam cryptid best known as the Long-Necked Dog has never been confirmed as a dog, wolf, or any other canine. Also called the Cold Beach Skulker and Scuttling Rex, it is a stooped and skeletal figure that walks on four needle-thin legs, according to witnesses. It sways back and forth in the air as it moves—as if perpetually off-balance—yet maneuvers with unsettling speed.

The Long-Necked Dog is always sighted at Cold Beach, foraging along the shore after dusk. Its strange, skittering movements have been described as reminiscent of a dock spider, making it easy to spot against the sand in the waning light, even as precise details are more difficult to pick out. Accounts generally agree that it is mottled and dark, and has a long, stooped neck that hangs low to the ground, the origin of its popularized name.

Due to its evasiveness, the cryptid has become something of an unofficial mascot for the Cold Beach waterfront, with many shops along the shore selling T-shirts and hats bearing its striking silhouette.

The Long-Necked Dog unofficial logo

Only one witness has ever claimed to get a close look at the Long-Necked Dog. In the winter of 1991, beachcomber and self-described detectorist Ashton Guyver was scanning the shore with his metal detector when he reportedly came across the creature feeding on a beached shark.

According to Guyver, as his flashlight caught it, the creature raised its long neck, which he purported wasn’t a neck at all—but another leg. The “dog,” as he claimed, actually had many more than four legs tucked into its body, and many, many more than two eyes. Those eyes, he said, glowed with a milky light beneath the flashlight’s beam.

Here, Guyver’s account becomes confused, a rambling and sometimes contradictory account of the creature speaking to him before retreating to a burrow hidden under the docks, dragging the bloated shark behind it. In an interview with local news station WROT-13, he claimed that the Long-Necked Dog told him of a fabulous treasure buried in secret caverns beneath the beach—of gold and jewelry collected over countless years. Guyver welcomed any fellow treasure hunters to join him in looking for an entrance to the caverns, promising to split the riches.

As far as anyone knows, not a single person took him up on his offer—which is probably for the best. Guyver disappeared the next evening after heading off toward the beach alone. Only his metal detector was ever recovered, its sinewy neck bent into a ruin.

1

“It’s still too early.”

Emrys Houtman sighed from behind his binoculars. He and his friend Hazel were perched on the dunes, peering down at Cold Beach below. They’d been there for an hour already, passing the binoculars back and forth, searching for signs of movement on the sand.